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I'm not sure if the hacking forum is the best place for this, but I noticed something interesting that I thought I'd share.

I recently obtained a NFR kiosk demo cartridge of Mario and Luigi Dream Team (it's the newest 3DS kiosk demo as far as I know)... no I will not tell you how or where, don't ask.

Like all the other NFRs I've collected, if you insert the cartridge into your 3DS, it powers it on and boots the game up right away. Since it's a demo and is designed to be used in retail environments, it also disables use of the home button, so all you can do is hold power to turn the system off - and as soon as you turn it back on, it insta-boots the game again.

However, if you have the system turned on, and on the main menu when you insert one of these demo carts, it will show up like a regular game and behave as such (until you start it, then Home gets disabled etc)

Just like M&L Dream Team's retail counterpart, the demo "requires" firmware version 5.1. I tested this out on my Gateway-compatible 3DS XL which is on firmware 4.5 - when I insert the demo cart, it says I need to update to 5.1. However, if I stick the cart in with the system turned off, it boots just fine and doesn't require an update!

Meaning the game works perfectly fine on 4.5. I believe this has something to do with the game being made with an older SDK, similar to what was mentioned in another thread here, but I thought that it was worth noting that it *is* possible for a 3DS system to bypass the mandatory update if it's signed as a demo cartridge from Nintendo. (No hacking required)

The real question would be, how would one of these games react on a very old (let's say, firmware 2.0 or something) 3DS... I wonder if it would attempt to boot and just glitch out instead. If anyone has a 3DS on very old firmware that would like to test it, send me a PM, I'm interested in the name of science

Region lock is still active, so the home menu will refuse to launch demos with incorrect region lock will not load, displaying "An Error has Occurred". However, game card update partition checks do not appear to be done, which may allow launching demos that have region free encoding, but have an alternate region update partition.